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Reach out and touch a rain cloud. Standing in front of a tiny farm house diorama, I reached out my hand and brushed it through a bundle of golden brown wheat sprouting from the ground. I could feel every blade of grain run across the surface of my hand. I then extended out my hand

HTC says its Viveport Subscription service is still looking for its very own Game of Thrones.

In a recent interview with Game Daily, Viveport President Rikard Steiber explained that the company is on the hunt for apps to launch first on its service that will help draw in new audiences.

“I do think what we’re trying to do is, we’re of course looking for our Game of Thrones” Steiber said. “So we want to have something that we launch first with, so more people discover our subscription service. I think going forward you’re going to see more of those things that are launching first in subscription as well. So we will make some sort of arrangement with the developer, and we have our own studio as well. I think that’s something we’re looking to do more.”

Currently, Viveport Subscription allows users to download up to five titles per months for $8.99. At the start of the following month, you can swap out games and get another five titles, keep playing what you have, or mix and match. For the rest of the year, HTC is hoping to entice developers to the platform by offering a 100% revenue share.

Steiber reasoned that the service is currently a “great complement” for users that perhaps buy big VR games like Skyrim or Fallout, though it sounds like HTC is hoping to have a game of that caliber to call its own. The question is, where does it come from? Vive does work on developing and publishing titles with partners under its Studios label, but so far this hasn’t produced anything near the level of a Game of Thrones-caliber experience.

“I definitely think that this is the future, and I think we’re looking to do some pilots in this area,” Steiber added. “And our studios have been producing great titles. Most recently we had Ready Player One, which was probably one of the most downloaded ones. It’s been a free app, but we’re looking to launch premium versions of that in the not too distant future as well.”

Remember HTC’s Vive Trackers? They’re a great little peripheral that allows you to bring a variety of objects into VR by fitting them with this puck-shaped marker. But, as cool as they are, we haven’t seen a lot of games embrace the Trackers.

Fit It wants to change that.

This new game from a team of three developers has a simple, brilliant premise; using three Trackers for the same kind of full body tracking seen in games like Island 359, you move your body to fit holes in gradually approaching walls. It’s pretty simple stuff; does the hole fit a press up position? Better get down on the floor. Standing with one leg out? Best practice your balance.

It’s a concept now seen in a lot of TV game shows, but Fit It promises to bring that experience into the home. The gamer will feature both a Classic mode with different difficulties and an Infinite mode in which walls won’t stop approaching. It looks like great fun, though we don’t know many people with enough Trackers to accommodate it.

To that end, the team’s Lukas Litinskas explained that they were implementing mode modes that would support play without Trackers and headsets other than the Vive.

“We are a team of VR enthusiasts, so it is important to us to bring more content to the community, especially to this specific area,” Litinskas said. “Because at the moment there is not a lot of games that use trackers. Most are saying that a very few people have trackers so it is not a good financial decision to focus on this area, but we think the numbers of people owning trackers will definitely grow after there is a significant amount of playable content available.”

Fit It is coming to Steam Early Access on October 16th. At launch, it will require a 2m x 2m play space and only work with Vive. Expect wider accessibility options to roll out after that.

Typoman developer Brainseed Factory is nearing the release of its first VR game, Squishies.

The studio recently reintroduced the game, which UploadVR helped reveal last year, as an exclusive for Sony’s PlayStation VR (PSVR) headset. It’s set to release on 20th November, and it looks like it’s come a fair way since we last saw it.

via Gfycat

In Squishies, you push cutesy little critters (which, yes, are indeed squishy) around gauntlet-style levels in search of the goal. Using Move controllers to blow your friends across stages, you can gather bonus crystals that present a bit of extra challenge and dive head-first into diorama-like stages. The game also boasts a full level editor that enables you to share your creations with friends.

We were quite fond of what we played from the game’s early build. It’s not going to be a platform-defining game by any means, but there’s definitely fun to be had with Squishies.

Google’s Owlchemy Labs just revealed one of its experiments using ARCore on a phone to offer a spectator view into the upcoming game Vacation Simulator.

We’ve just come from Oculus Connect 5 where Facebook’s teams demonstrated a series of experiments that together included full body tracking, arena-scale movement freedom and mixed reality which incorporates real objects into the virtual world. In addition, they had an iPad set up which could look into the virtual world shared by the six players in VR.

Owlchemy’s experiment seems to encapsulate the same basic premise as the iPad portion of Facebook’s tech demonstration. Owlchemy only tried this experiment with ARCore, but in theory the same idea should work with Apple’s ARKit too. A blog post from Owlchemy breaks down exactly how hard it would be to add this to VR systems in the near future. According to the post:

The feature adds quite a bit of performance overhead to the PC with additional rendering and video encoding. The mobile device is also heavily taxed by simultaneously running ARCore and decoding video. Additionally, latency is noticeable due to the encoding/decoding process and round-trip delay time. These are just a few of the challenges we’ve noted, but we think it’s just as important to share these findings as part of the experimentation process.

Owlchemy was purchased by Google last year but has stayed pretty independent as work continued on Vacation Simulator — its follow up building upon the “insanely reusable” pieces of Job Simulator. Their mobile spectator camera — while only a concept at this point — also shows some interesting ideas for interaction.

Not only can another player interact with someone in VR this way, but it is also possible for the phone to be used to take a picture just like the real world. The PC sends the phone a high resolution selfie whenever you click the button to take the photo on the phone.

Devin Reimer, Ben Hopkins, and Ryan Dawson directly worked on the spectator camera for Owlchemy Labs. They’ve come a long way from mixed reality that Owlchemy helped pioneer in PC VR’s earlier days, but a representative also made clear the mobile spectator app is just a research project and “we don’t currently have any plans to release it.”

Today Astro Bot: Rescue Mission is finally out on PSVR! This third-person 3D platformer is really something special, evoking a similar feeling to other whimsical mascot adventures like Lucky’s Tale or even Super Mario. You can read our full review for the run down on why we love it so much and tune in today for a live playthrough and Q&A with the game.

We’ll be Astro Bot on PSVR in front of a green screen so you can see all of the head movements and reactions while we play — we’ll just have to check on chat by peaking under the headset. The stream will be starting at approximately 3:00 PM PT and we’ll aim to last for around an hour or so. We’ll be livestreaming directly to the UploadVR Facebook page will also be using Restream to go directly to YouTube, Twitch, Periscope, and Mixer as well. Either way, you can see the full stream embedded right here down below once it’s up:

You can see our most recent archived streams over on the UploadVR Facebook Gaming portal right here. There’s lots of good stuff there!

Let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next. Comment with feedback down below!